How tiny houses and shipping containers can help people who are homeless

LOS ANGELES — It measures only 8 feet by 8 feet. But to Stephen Smith, the tiny red house in North Hollywood is the place he calls home.

Until early last month, Smith had been living out of his car in locations around the San Fernando Valley, collecting cans from city parks as a way of making spare change. He ended up on the street not through a single event, but a slippery chain of them: the death of his mother last year followed by the pandemic, which left him in an emotional and economic lurch.

"Me and my mom were best friends," he says. "I took it kind of bad."

After a year on the streets, however, Smith was ready for a change. When a caseworker from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority approached him with an offer of shelter over the winter, he took it.

The caseworker connected him with Chandler Street Tiny Home Village in North Hollywood, a shelter that is the first of its kind in Los Angeles. Instead of a bed in a dorm, Smith was assigned his own freestanding tiny home. The dwelling does not have a bathroom — those are shared, along with a laundry facility and a kitchenette. But otherwise, Smith’s space is his own.

"I wouldn't change nothing," he says of the structure's design. "I don't see any improvements I could make." Though he does say the village could use more bathrooms.

Philadelphia has committed to establishing two of its own tiny-house villages as part of the agreement that closed the sprawling, controversial homeless encampment on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in October.

Chandler Street in LA, which is operated by Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission, is an interim housing shelter designed for stays of three to six months — a site that helps clients get back on their feet as they seek other housing. On-site caseworkers assist with basics such as securing paperwork to recover lost IDs, connecting people to basic services, and providing a steady address as they apply for jobs or benefits.

» READ MORE: City chooses Black-owned firm to develop tiny-house village in West Philly

"It's a spot to stabilize," says Laurie Craft, Hope of the Valley's chief program officer. "So that when people move into permanent supportive housing, the result is good."

The pandemic has brought with it numerous reckonings. Among them, the moral question of how a society as wealthy as our own shelters the unhoused. Central to that question are issues of politics, policy and design, and how they come together to create solutions that are long-lasting. Design is a critical piece — since what a shelter looks like and how it functions can help determine whether it is successful in getting a client to stick around.

And in Los Angeles, there couldn't be a more critical time to grapple with these issues than this moment.

In late March, the punitive eviction of an estimated 200 people from a long-running encampment at Echo Park Lake generated national headlines. That was followed by a report, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which shows that encampment removals are not only extraordinarily costly, but they also don't work. As one encampment is razed, others pop up elsewhere — turning the already tenuous existence of the unhoused into a vicious circle of relocation.

Furthermore, the Los Angeles City Council appears headed toward a settlement of a federal lawsuit that would require shelter to be provided for thousands of homeless people living around freeways. What form these shelters might take remains unknown.

For the city and the county, this means finding land and cutting bureaucratic red tape so that projects can be more speedily approved and built. Already, there is experimentation with modular houses and recycled shipping containers in sites around Los Angeles. These can shave months off the building process, since they can be assembled on site — sometimes over parking lots and other terrain that would have required extensive preparation otherwise.

Chandler Tiny Home Village, which was designed by the Los Angeles firm Lehrer Architects, opened in February.

The village — which cost $4.4 million to build — occupies a teardrop-shaped sliver of city land tucked along the Orange Line busway at Chandler Boulevard and Tujunga Avenue. In a previous life, the parcel was a weed-strewn lot and graffiti magnet. "It was a useless piece of land made more useless because of its shape," says architect Michael Lehrer, his firm's namesake and founder.

» READ MORE: Philadelphia green-lights plans for first-ever tiny-house village for homeless

Now the site harbors 39 bright prefab tiny homes manufactured by Pallet, a company based in Everett, Wash. The pitched-roof units resemble storybook houses and sleep up to two people. They are arranged around a forked path that also contains a picnic area and a dog run. (A critical component in being more hospitable to the unhoused: not forcing them to separate from beloved pets.)

"Every individual gets their own home and it has a door and they can lock it, and that's huge," says Lehrer. "It's a safe space."

Even with limited time and even more limited resources, the architects have found ways to introduce aesthetic play into this work. As Lehrer Architects partner Nerin Kadribegovic says, "How do you fit all of this onto a constrained site and then add a little bit of something to make a place of desire?"

That desire comes from preserving existing trees for improvised park areas and bright color palettes.

"Asphalt and chain link are hard things to overcome," says Lehrer. "It's like, if there is asphalt and chain link, this is not a place that honors and respects people."

Creating humane outdoor spaces was also critical to architect Louise Griffin, who served as project manager for NAC Architecture on the design and construction of Care First Village in downtown. "The rooms are small, so it was important to make the courtyards a place you could socialize," she says.

Michael Pinto, a principal at NAC Architecture, says it's about creating a setting that feels like home, not a punitive institution. "What options do we have that isn't jail?" he asks rhetorically. "Can we stop criminalizing homelessness?"

Lehrer says good design isn't ancillary to these issues. "Design excellence is central," he says emphatically. "This is important for the people [shelters] serve and it's important for the neighborhoods they serve and it's important for the culture — that we can honor our sisters and brothers and bring them into the community."